Introducing the Interrobang

A splendid distraction sprang into my inbox this afternoon in the form of Anne Trubek’s cultural history of the interrobang. The interrowhatsit, you say? You’ve used it before, I suspect, unwittingly or in nascent form: it’s the ?! of surprise and disbelief you smack at the end of some sentences except, in the case of the interrobang, the exclamation point and question mark are superimposed. What a typesetter’s treasure! Trubek reveals that the punctuation mark was invented by a “Mad Men”-era ad man (who also, alas, chose the downright-dirty sounding name; another proposed name, the quesclamation mark, strikes me as capturing the glyph’s particular élan better), and that in its heyday, Remington gave it its own typewriter key alongside your more humdrum commas and apostrophes.

Trubek’s post led me down a rabbit hole of unknown punctuation (and to this befuddling quiz). Such finds! Who knew our most obscure bits of punctuation also had such obscurely lovely names? I felt I could chant them as a liturgy of linguistics, or recite them together as a quirky poem from Lewis Carroll, filled with the fantastic beasts of our language: there were guillemets, a pilcrow, a caret, a sheffer stroke, a chevron. There was even an irony mark, a piece of punctuation I thought could render many an e-mail less offensive and many a blog post obsolete (until, that is, I found the unquestionably superior snark mark, denoted by a wiggly snakelike line at the end of a sentence).

But if the idea of adding punctuation marks to the language inspired in me a temporary editor’s glee (for a moment, I imagined myself the cackling wolf, saying, Ah, my little red writing hood, the better to delineate your sentences with!), I soon found my view of these novel marks wandering into an unexpected area. I’m a luddite and slow adapter, a late blooming texter and rare tweeter, someone who looks a little cross-eyed at the newest gadgets other members of my generation trumpet. But I realized these little pieces of punctuation reminded me most profoundly of a thing I thought I disdained: the emoticon. Both reflect back on the words before them, both color-in the lines, add emphasis and feeling. And the comparison, much to my shame, showed me that it was not the elegant pen marks and brief blocks of type that added the largest range of expression to a sentence. It was those cheery, chubby faces, instant purveyors of mood.